Bildung Seminar
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[edit] Overview
This page provides a summary of a short seminar series that I (Norm Friesen) gave at Oulu University in Finland in May, 2009. It includes a general description (Introduction), as well as PowerPoint files for each of the individual sessions of the seminar. Summaries for each of these sessions are also provided.
[edit] Introduction to "Bildung and North American Learning Sciences"
Bildung, recently defined as the “reciprocal interrelationship of world and individual” (Klafki, 1997), is a term with both current relevance and a rich intellectual heritage. Over the centuries, its humanistic emphases have been reformulated and reaffirmed in a variety of ways. It has received some of its most recent reconsiderations in the English language, some by the likes of Gundem, Hopmann, Løvlie and Biesta. The “Learning Sciences,” on the other hand, refers to a relatively recent, interdisciplinary development in specifically North American educational theory and research. It focuses on the development of innovations in technology and design, and particularly on scientific understandings of human learning that are simultaneously positivistic and eclectic –including experimental methods, but also extending to ethnography and ethnomethodology (e.g. Sawyer, 2006). At the same time, influences evident in the Learning Sciences can be traced back to developments in North American educational research occuring during and after the First World War.
The time from the turn of the century to the inter-war period is significant for both Northern European Bildung and North American sciences of education. It represents, of course, a crisis for traditional theories of Bildung, and it has been interpreted as a moment when Germanic and American intellectual traditions of education parted ways irremediably (Lagemann, 1989). In this series of lectures, however, Dr. Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair at Thompson Rivers University presents a different interpretation of these developments and their consequences: Dr. Friesen will explore lively points of contact that have connected North American educational theory and Northern European Bildung at significant moments during the 20th century. Dr. Friesen will present these as a part of a kind of “subterranean” history of the influence of aspects of Bildung in North American research and theory leading up to the Learning Sciences.
Dr. Friesen will trace this largely “buried” influence and history in the context of three seminar sessions with members of the Theoretical Foundations of Education at Oulu University. The first of these sessions will focus on the relevance of Bildung in contemporary English and North American conceptions of learning and education, specifically those emphasizing embodied, situated, anthropological aspects of education. In the second session, Dr. Friesen will consider ways in which discussions of media and generational dynamics –from Karl Mannheim through Marshall McLuhan—have echoed descriptions of educational and communicative processes and priorities described, for example, in Klafki’s Neue Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik and in Klaus Mollenhauer’s Vergessene Zusammenhänge. Finally, in the third session, Dr. Friesen will conclude with a presentation focusing on one example of the closer convergence of these two traditions in the present day: the growing relevance of phenomenology and related methods of ethnomethodology to educational research and theory in North America and in the Learning Sciences in particular. Here the influence is no longer entirely tacit, but becomes noticeably explicit, signaling a more general rapprochement between continental and Anglo-American ways of thinking.
[edit] Session 1. Bildung and its Hidden History
It goes without saying that the intellectual tradition of Bildung and the characteristics of North American educational theory and research are complex and diffuse. Tracing their recent convergence and divergence initially requires that salient and potentially interrelated elements of each tradition first be delineated and highlighted. In this first presentation, Dr. Friesen will undertake this through reference to the work of both Wolfgang Klafki, who provides one of the most recent re-interpretations of the contemporary relevance of German Bildung, and Ellen Lagemann, a pre-eminent historian of American educational research. The characteristics of both American and Northern European research will serve as the basis for the identification of a number of conspicuous counter-examples, which bridge the divergent traditions. These are provided by European émigrés, who (during the Second World War and after) addressed American and other educational issues. These are also provided by other researchers outside of the American educational mainstream, such as those at the XEROX PARC research center in Palo Alto, California. Dr. Friesen will discuss the contributions of a number of researchers of this kind, and will explore how their work highlights concerns and issues which are important to Bildung, but are not often explicitly understood in these terms.
[edit] Session 2. Media and Intergenerational Processes
The second session focuses on understandings of educational and communicative processes as they relate to the technologies and processes of media. Discussions of the relevance of media (writing, print, television, Internet) to education represent another example of the interconnection of North American and European contexts. Unlike the points of influence described above, which only bridge divergent traditions, the question of media can be said to represent an area of mutual convergence in traditions: In both intellectual contexts, the connection of the school to the technology of print and the centrality of literacy has been emphasized by prominent spokespersons. For example, Klaus Mollenhauer (1987) associates with the written word and the rise of literacy the emergence of a “pedagogical sphere” (distinct from the spheres of private and public life) and he sees printing and literacy as giving rise to a specifically “representational” educational dynamic. Similarly, Neil Postman has written in the American context about the influence of mediatic change on education and on conceptions of childhood, and has used terms remarkably similar to Mollenhauer’s to argue that newer media threaten conventional or traditional schooling.
[edit] Session 3. Phenomenology and ethnomethodology
Phenomenology and ethnomethodology are methodological innovations that are being introduced to mainstream educational research through the Learning Sciences. In this presentation, Dr. Friesen will make the case that these methodologies are associated with understandings of education and socialization that are intrinsically germane to the tradition of Bildung. Both methodological orientations blur the boundary between formal, functional processes and cultural, aesthetic understandings: Phenomenology examines education experientially and relationally, rather than in terms of means-ends rationality; similarly, ethnomethodology sees general and formal social constructions (educational and otherwise) as arising through the improvisational and existential engagements of those involved. Education, teaching and learning end up being configured in both methodological contexts as processes that are reducible neither to unreflective socialization nor to pure psychological instrumentality. Dr. Friesen will explore the various interpretations of education articulated from these methodological perspectives by both European and Anglo-American contributors, including Wilfried Lippitz, Max van Manen and Wolff-Michael Roth.
References
- Klafki, W. (1996). Neue Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik. Zeitgemäße und kritisch-konstruktive Didaktik. Basel.
- Mollenhauer, K. (1983). Vergessene Zusammenhänge: über Kultur und Erziehung. Munich: Juventa.
- Sawyer, R.K. (2006a). Introduction: The new science of learning. In R.K. Sawyer (Ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 1–16.
